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Showing posts from July, 2017

the death of tdd

Several years ago, Colin had the pleasure of working with Mike and his team as they embarked on their Agile journey. As with many teams, they went through stages of what might be termed maturity. First, they learned how to plan and work iteratively, later they learned incremental working. Finally, they reached a point where they wanted to improve their engineering practices and so Colin had introduced them to Test-Driven Development. Now he was sitting listening to Mike, the technical team lead for the team, explain to him why TDD wasn’t working for them. "You see, TDD forces you to decouple everything” he said, “You taught us the SOLID principles, JSP and the Composed Method pattern?” He looked down into his cappuccino, “you introduced us to clean code, too. We’ve followed the rules in the book to the letter and now we’ve found it’s just too difficult to write code.” I was curious about his statement, “What do you mean it’s too difficult?” I asked. Mike was hesitant at first but